Saturday, March 19, 2011

In an age of universal skepticism religion looks worried

It is simply a fact that we live in a world where people are increasingly more ready and able to question things. Now I know that there is cognitive dissonance, where people can apply different standards to their own beliefs than to others. I also know that religion is so engrained in culture that it often passes under the radar. I will even grant that most people are still not all that skeptical, because that requires independent, critical thinking. However, given all that, I still submit that people do question more things. We live in a time where almost anything can be questioned far more openly that ever before. Therefore, because everything is up for grabs it means that even the one thing which declared itself immune from criticism since the earliest of times, is no longer immune from criticism.

Of course people won't always criticize it all that vigorously, because often we just don't care about it. Still, some people will and, as it turns out, in this day and age of modern digital communication, it is a bad day to be an obscurantist bible literalist. Boy did you guys pick the wrong time to invest all your money in buggy whip factories, a century after people stopped riding horse drawn carriages as a primary means of transportation. That is the digital equivalent of what is necessary to maintain the blinders of biblical literalism in an age where people can look at any version of the bible and any number of commentaries, pro and con, on a given biblical passage.